Modification of the laws of gravity in the DGP model by the presence of a second DGP brane

Abstract

We investigate how the laws of gravity change in the DGP model, if we add a second, parallel 3-brane, endowed with a localized gravitational curvature term. We calculate the gravitational potential energy between two static point sources localized on different branes. We discover a new length scale, which is equal to the geometric mean of the DGP cross-over scale and the separation of the two branes in the extra dimension. For distances, which are larger than this new length scale, we recover the original DGP result, but for smaller distances the gravitational potential is weaker. Furthermore, a region emerges, where a 4-dimensional observer measures a distance independent force. We discuss a possible application of the present scenario for deriving rotation curves of low surface brightness galaxies. Using the Kaluza-Klein description, we observe a curious pattern, in which even and odd KK-modes contribute to the attractive and repulsive parts of the gravitational potential, respectively. Finally, since this setup allows for the existence of a sector of particle species that are interacting arbitrarily weakly with “our” sector, we discuss the implications of this phenomenon for black holes and the bound on the number of species. We find that the behavior is qualitatively different from theories with a normalizable zero-mode graviton.